Troubled Teens Resources

Do you feel blindsided? You just went through your son’s bedroom, you were only picking up laundry, and there it was. What is it, a stash, is that what they call it? You don’t know the lingo of teen age drug abuse yet but you do know your pain pills when you see them. And you know damn well that’s pot.

You look around the room at the trophies, the photos of him on the swim team, his awards. You just had a great golf outing with him. What in blue blazes is going on?

Some parents are just plain irresponsible. They don’t see casual drug use as any more than a rite of passage. But then there are those conscientious and dedicated parents who did it right, they feel that they have a good relationship with their kids. The possibility of their teen using drugs just didn’t ever seem possible.

“By all accounts, Jimmie Moyer was a typical American kid. He played sports, his family took vacations together, there was nothing – nothing at least immediately visible – to suggest that he was at risk for drug addiction.

But around the time he was 12 years old, Owens said, Jimmie began to smoke pot. Over an extended period of time, his drug of choice changed to methamphetamine and his usage soared, to the point where he was using significant amounts per day.”
[…]
After a long battle with methamphetamine addiction, he came to his family asking for help in his own personal war against the drug. His family sent him to a recovery facility out-of-state to separate him for the drug dealers and users that he knew.

Six days into that recovery program, he took his life.”

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An issue that is a constant when working with youth in schools for troubled teens is evaluating for depression. Though depression is most usually associated with girls, recent reports cite teen suicide statistics that indicate that depression can affect both genders. Depression is not always indicated by sadness and dejection. Hostility, aggression and belligerence are also manifestations of depression.

The Penn State massacre has prompted closer scrutiny on teen mental health assessments, with some advocates suggesting mental health evaluations for teens be mandatory while others promote voluntary screening. Such a program has been made available to communities throughout the nation.

“The goal of the Columbia University TeenScreen Program is to ensure that all parents are offered the opportunity for their teens to receive a voluntary mental health check-up. The program’s primary objective is to help young people and their parents through the early identification of mental health problems, such as depression. Parents of youth found to be at possible risk are notified and helped with identifying and connecting to local mental health services where they can obtain further evaluation. No child is screened without parental consent. The results of the screen are confidential. Mental health screening can take place in any number of venues, including schools, clinics, doctors’ offices, juvenile justice facilities - in short, anywhere that a group of teens is present.”

(Source)

Teen crisis intervention is most emphatically indicated when a teen attempts suicide. If there is any time that a family should pursue professional counseling and teen help for themselves and their troubled teenager, it is in the aftermath of a teen’s suicide attempt. Yet, unfortunately, only 30% of affected families do enter therapy.

“…families desperately need support and direction after a child attempts suicide. Depression, which leads to suicidal thinking, affects the entire family unit. To move past the tragedy, families must address the issues that the suicide caused, and continues to cause, in their lives. Chief among the issues is the family’s increased sense of responsibility for the child who attempted suicide. Worried about a repeat suicide attempt, family members, and parents in particular, feel that they have to watch their child constantly—in some cases, sleeping at the foot of the child’s bed every night to make sure he or she won’t attempt suicide.”

Families need help finding balance in their handling of a suicidal teen. There is an balancing act that has to be maintained between intrusive and claustrophobic protection and being vigilant. Complicating matters further is the mental state of the parent or sibling who may have discovered his or her brother after the attempt.

“Often siblings are just as stressed out as the parents because they find the brother after the overdose, or they are the ones in the background while Mom and Dad and the brother are having all of the conflict…
[..]
Working with therapists… patients… learn skills to cope, ways to self-soothe and to seek out sources of support other than their parents.
[..]
Parents, in turn, learn how to listen and not overreact.”

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The link above will provide a list of symptoms to look for.

When a teenager slashes their wrist, they effectively wound the entire family.

“When a child attempts suicide, emotions hit families like a Mack truck…. matter how a family deals with the aftermath of a suicide, they are forever changed by it.”

What makes teen age suicide all the more difficult for the teen and their family to recover from is that often the suicide is unacknowledged, with the teen in denial and the family unwilling to push the matter back into the spotlight.

“Many families don’t pursue treatment because they deny or minimize their child’s suicide attempt. Teenagers who attempt suicide may also not admit they tried to kill themselves. “Even when you see a young person in the emergency room right after he or she completed an attempt, very quickly the denial kicks in,” Hoover says. “She may say, ‘I never meant it,’ or ‘it was an accident,’ or denying she even made an attempt. Families do the same thing because of the intensity of the suicide issue.”

Often a teen suicide is blamed on the teen’s drug abuse without an understanding of the underlaying emotional factors that precipitated both the drug abuse and the attempted suicide. When a teen commits suicide their emotional pain becomes a family affair. Though healing takes time, denial only prolongs it, making the entire family vulnerable and weakened.

“Once the child who attempted suicide learns how to deal with his or her hopelessness and depression, and the parents begin to deal with their own anxieties and guilty or angry feelings, then they may be ready for family therapy. Family therapy helps family members learn how to communicate better with each other and express their feelings more constructively.”

(Source)

“Can you tell you have depression without diagnosis? I can’t even begin to explain things in my life. I’m so stessed, from everything. In the back of my mind, even though I’m not actually thinking of killing myself or anything, I really honestly always, even when I’m happy, believe that I would be better off dead. It’s not unhappiness as much as it’s a wish to rather not be living. I mean, idk. I can be having the best time of my life, and I still wish I wasn’t alive, and I’d wish I didn’t have to go through it, because I have it in my head that it’ll eventually get worse, because it ALWAYS does. It’s where you come to this realization that you’ve worked so hard to get through so many bad things that have already happened in your life, and you just want it to be over and you want there to be happiness and you don’t want to have to worry for the rest of your life, but I know this is only the beginning, because I’m a teenager. I don’t want to go on. I really just wanna die and get it over with and idk how to deal with it. What do I do?”
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This from a depressed teenager reaching out to other teens on a message board. If you take the time to read various teen boards, you will find that these type of inquiries, unfortunately, are not unusual.

Studies indicate there is typically a constellation of factors that will push a teen into a suicidal crisis. Interestingly enough, even though the internet has spawned such sites as Myspace and other virtual venues for communication, technology has been seen as an additional factor in a troubled teen’s sense of isolation and loneliness.

Combine that with the unrealistic images of the fabulous lives enjoyed by celebrity teens and movies celebrating out of control teenagers wrecking havoc with little consequences, the teens sense of unreality and marginalization increases.

Teenagers may commiserate with each other, assured of anonymity, on a teen board, but they are unlikely to approach an adult for comfort. It is the responsibility of the parent or teacher to recognize the signs of teen depression and devise an intervention.

Here is a partial summary of risk factors inherent in a possible suicidal teenager:

• Previous suicide attempts - If a youth has attempted suicide in the past, he or she is much more likely than other youths to attempt suicide again in the future. If a male teen has attempted suicide in the past, he is more than thirty times more likely to complete suicide, while a female with a past attempt has about three times the risk. Approximately a third of teenage suicide victims have made a previous suicide attempt.18
• Mental disorders or co-occurring mental and alcohol or substance abuse disorders - Research shows that over 90% of young people who complete suicide have a diagnosable mental or substance abuse disorder or both, and that the majority have depressive illness.19 In a 10- to 15-year followup study of 73 adolescents diagnosed with major depression, 7 percent of the adolescents had completed suicide sometime later. The depressed adolescents were five times more likely to have attempted suicide as well, compared with a control group of age peers without depression.20 Almost half of teenagers who complete suicide have had a previous contact with a mental health professional. In addition, aggressive, disruptive, and impulsive behavior is common in youth of both sexes who complete suicide.21
• Family history of suicide22 - A high proportion of suicides and attempters have had a close family member (sibling, parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent) who attempted or completed suicide. Familial suicide can be a function of imitation or genetics. Many of the mental illnesses which contribute to suicide risk appear to have a genetic component.
• Stressful life event or loss - Stressful life events often precede a suicide and/or suicide attempt. Such stressful life events include getting into trouble at school or with a law enforcement agency; fighting or breaking up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend; and fighting with friends. They are rarely a sufficient cause of suicide, but they often act as precipitating factors in young people.23, 24
• Easy access to lethal methods, especially guns - As mentioned above, firearms are the most common method of suicide by youth. The most common location for the occurrence of firearm suicides by youth is in their homes, and there is a positive association between the accessibility and availability of firearms in the home and the risk for youth suicide. The risk conferred by guns in the home is proportional to the accessibility (e.g., loaded and unsecured firearms) and the number of guns in the home.25, 26
• Exposure to the suicidal behavior of others, whether that of a peer or in the media 27 - Suicide can be facilitated in vulnerable teens by exposure to real or fictional accounts of suicide, including media coverage of suicide, such as intensive reporting of the suicide of a celebrity, or the fictional representation of a suicide in a popular movie or TV show. In addition, there is evidence of suicide clusters, that is, local epidemics of suicide that have a contagious influence. Suicide clusters nearly always involve previously disturbed young people who knew about each other’s death but rarely knew the other victims personally.
• Incarceration28 - Although there are insufficient national data regarding the incidence of youth suicide in custody, information suggests a high prevalence of suicidal behavior in juvenile correctional facilities. One study found that suicide in juvenile detention and correctional facilities was more than four times greater than youth suicide overall. According to another recent study, more than 11,000 juveniles engage in more than 17,000 incidents of suicidal behavior in juvenile facilities each year.

(Source)

Also see Mental Health Sanctuary’s list of suicide hot lines and online communication resources. Crisis intervention includes being prepared before the crisis, in hopes of ultimately preventing one.

Sometimes an intervention can be a simple thing.
I ran into a  story about a simple kindness that resulted in saving the life of a depressed teenager.

It is a story that you may want to share with your own teenagers who may often feel powerless when they are witness to the cruelties of school yard bullies.

“One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.” I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends tomorrow afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on.

As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him and as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, “Those guys are jerks. They really should get lives.”

He looked at me and said, “Hey thanks!” There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude. I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now.

I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play football on Saturday with me and my friends. He said yes.
[..]
Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown, and was going to Duke… Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn’t me having to get up there and speak.
[..]
As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began “Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach… but mostly your friends. I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story.”

I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn’t have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. “Thankfully, I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.”
from Jared’s Story.com

I don’t know if the events in this story actually occurred, but the lesson it demonstrates expresses a profound truth. One never knows which simple act of kindness will heal. Small interventions of kindness can circumvent a looming crisis in a struggling teenager’s life.